This is a guest blog post by Lia Pieters, Community Manager, Flexxible IT.

The COVID-19 pandemic has presented organizations everywhere with unprecedented challenges. Managing these challenges successfully depends on adapting your operating model or scaling existing systems to support increased remote working.

Whether your organization has embraced remote work or is culturally averse to it, remote work is the new reality and is now probably part of your day-to-day business operations. If you have effective remote work capabilities in place, you have an advantage. It will help you attract the best talent, improve employee retention, and deliver a great employee experience. Now more than ever, remote work is critical to business success.

For organizations that haven’t embraced remote work, it’s time to reconsider. There’s a new normal, and adapting to support remote work will not only help you to address immediate challenges, it’ll help to improve your competitive advantage.

Keys to Effective Remote Working

In general, organizations have two primary considerations around remote work — team management and IT systems support. Having clear and established guidelines for employees and managers is important for effective remote working. But in times of crisis, when circumstances rapidly evolve, work policies might not be clearly established and business operations might be affected temporarily. There’s a lot of great guidance out there from management consultants and research organizations on effective remote working for teams. Our focus is on IT and enabling digital workspace continuity. IT can have the greatest impact in keeping the business going by delivering existing desktop and app environments to employees wherever they work.

Organizations that already have remote work capabilities in place are at a considerable advantage. Nevertheless, every organizations’ ability to deliver is likely to be hindered in some way during a crisis, whether it’s due to lack of experienced IT resources, critical system capacity, usage intelligence, or ability to scale quickly.

Deliver Familiarity

The key to frictionless remote working is the availability of familiar services. A remote working solution must extend what users already use and know well. For example, moving to a new online application that requires learning will add complexity. And any solution must be good for your IT team. Implementing virtual private networking to deliver remote access might seem like a good idea, but it will require device intervention and all the increased support. There’s also the risk of data being stored on unauthorized and potentially insecure devices.

Make Workspaces Virtual

Virtualizing user desktops and application environments is by far the most effective and scalable solution. It enables employees to work anywhere on any device, without the need for reconfiguration or IT intervention. Whether you already have virtual desktops in place or are in the implementation process, it is likely that you will need to quickly scale to cope with increased demand.

When sudden spikes in remote work arise like now, it’s the simplification and automation of repeatable processes in the delivery of infrastructure that will enable rapid scaling. Understanding which apps are critical to operations and have the intelligence to guide deployment requirements and deliver immediately will help to keep critical business operations running.

Know Your Apps

Requiring workers to adapt to new solutions is too disruptive. Their focus in times of change is on maintaining business as usual from a new workplace. Understanding the apps — desktop, web, or SaaS — in use and their importance is vital to keeping operations running as smoothly as possible. There will be apps that are critical to keeping the business running, others that are important to supporting core business operations, and still others you might not know about that play key supporting roles.

When infrastructure, your IT team, and your resources are stretched to capacity, your learn how resilient your systems are. While these challenges might push even the best IT departments beyond their limits, organizations must understand how their systems and infrastructure can be made more resilient.

How Can We Help?

The Citrix Ready-validated Apps2Digital is an online, Azure-hosted service that delivers evergreen application lifecycle management. Our unique approach to virtual workspace app management helps organizations rapidly adopt remote working to become more agile and resilient to business interruption.

Apps2Digital is integrated, validated and approved for use with Citrix Cloud Virtual Apps and Desktops service, and on-premises Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops. It creates a simple, precise view of the app landscape to give you deep insight into your current Citrix usage so you can be prepared for whatever comes your way.

This view of the application landscape will help you to analyze which apps employees use and how. It also enables IT to intelligently administrate, consolidate, and prioritize applications for delivery. This is especially beneficial for organizations looking into a cloud transition or migration project. Instead of migrating everything to the cloud, Apps2Digital enables organizations to ensure that only relevant applications are moved.

Learn more about Apps2Digital.